One-way speech on college campuses
By now, a number of the encampments on college campuses have finally been dispersed. That is good news and my hope is that this puts an end to this Occupy Nonsense effort that the left keeps trying to resurrect.
Despite that, though, students maintained these encampments for weeks. They stayed in direct violation of university rules, issued demands up to and including amnesty for breaking those rules, and even expected vegan food deliveries to their protest.
And the colleges demured from getting tough with them.
Yet, Abigail Shrier writing at The Free Press notes that there’s a double standard at play here. She starts by noting blatantly anti-semitic comments made by organizers of the protests and horrific abuses by protesters, all well before university administrators stepped up to address it, then brings up a different incident.
Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades.
In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.
American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate.
…
After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”
Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech.
In the abstract, if “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing.
It is, in fact, a double standard.
I’m very much of the camp that free speech has to include freedom of speech for things that you personally find detestable. There’s no need to protect popular, inoffensive speech. I can say kittens are adorable in even the most repressive regimes, simply because there’s no controversy involved. Some might disagree, but not to the point of being offended.
So if we’re going to have free speech on campus, it should include people being able to say anti-semitic things. I’ve never said otherwise.
But it also has to include other kinds of offensive speech as well.
Shrier brings up things like microaggressions, misgendering, and racist speech against black people as examples of things that would get a swift response from administrators, while this particular flavor of hatred is allowed under the guise of respecting free speech.
These universities don’t respect freedom of speech, though. We have years of evidence of students being punished for saying things that various university administrations didn’t approve of.
Something I’ve been pondering over the last few days is how these colleges would respond to a student encampment demanding gun rights for students.
See, in Virginia, what’s called “campus carry” is on the books, but it might as well not be. Why? Because it’s up to the individual universities to decide to allow it and only Liberty University does.
So what if a group of students pitched a bunch of tents at the University of Virginia and demanded their gun rights? Other than that, there would be no comparison to the most recent encampments. What I mean is that they’re polite, respectable, don’t hold people hostage or try to keep people out, none of that. They just pitch tents and ask for their voices to be heard.
Does anyone really think it would be permitted to remain for weeks? Or would it be broken up immediately?
If pro-gun students tried it now, administrators would claim it had everything to do with the recent protests, but we all know it would never have been tolerated well before this happened. This is because absolutely nothing else that went against progressive orthodoxy would have been permitted.
Free speech must mean both sides of the political divide get an equal say. Universities have clearly favored one side for generations now.
As a result, though, they ran into a case where they were supportive of objectively vile people who did objectively vile things to their fellow students and weren’t sure what to do.
Folks who don’t toe the progressive line would never get such latitude. We know this because they never have before.
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